Canada is banning the use of mammal parts in ruminant feed in August, co-ordinating laws here with a similar ban in the United States.
“These measures are taken as precautionary to minimize the possible risk of BSE in Canada,” said Fredrique Moulin, of the meat and poultry products division of the Canada Food Inspection Agency.
Originally, Canada planned to ban the feeding of ruminant parts to other ruminants. However, it widened the ban to more closely match proposed American regulations.
Ruminants are animals with four stomachs, such as cattle, goats, sheep, moose, deer and elk.
Read Also
Short rapeseed crop may put China in a bind
Industry thinks China’s rapeseed crop is way smaller than the official government estimate. The country’s canola imports will also be down, so there will be a lot of unmet demand.
There are some exceptions to the ban. Feeding milk, blood, gluten, rendered animal fat, or protein from pork or horse to ruminants is still allowed.
Excluded from ban
Bruce King, manager of Saskatoon Processing Co., said the regulations could have been even more stringent. About 90 percent of the meat and blood meal from his facility goes into chicken and pork feed. The ban does not include those feeds because it has been scientifically shown there is no danger to those animals from BSE.
That would have been a “nightmare scenario,” said King.
Saskatoon Processing renders about 10,000 hogs a week killed at Intercontinental Packers and 3,000 cattle a week slaughtered at Moose Jaw Packers. It also gets shipments from smaller plants in Saskatchewan.
The new regulations stem from World Health Organization recommendations last year to put in place a ruminant-feed ban to reduce the chances of BSE, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also know as mad cow disease. That disease is linked to Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, a terminal brain-wasting condition, in humans.
It is suspected cattle in the United Kingdom developed BSE from eating protein meal derived in part from infected sheep.
In Canada, little blood and bone meal is fed to beef animals. Some meal is used in dairy rations.
